Exanet Nets $18M

NAS startup Exanet has picked up $18 million in Series C funding, as the vendor adds search features to its core ExaStore product. (See Exanet Raises $18M.)

The round, which was led by Coral Capital Management, included hedge fund QVT and current investors Evergreen Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

Rami Schwartz, the Exanet CEO, told Byte and Switch that the round brings the vendor's total funding to "somewhere in between" $40 million and $60 million.

The clustered NAS specialist will use the cash influx to boost its sales and marketing efforts, expanding its workforce from 110 to 145 people, according to the exec. "We need to court more partners and train more partners," he says. Exanet now has about 30 partners.

The startup now claims more than 100 customers for its flagship ExaStore clustered NAS software, including U.K.-based post-production company Rushes, broadcaster Russia Today, and French local government body Conseil General 77. (See UK Film Co Picks Exanet.)Today the vendor also took the wraps off its latest NAS offering, a software-based search engine called ExaSearch for scanning file servers, email systems, and databases. ExaSearch runs on a standalone Windows server connected to a storage device running the vendor's ExaStore product. (See Exanet Takes Lead and Exanet Intros Software.) "That enables our customers to search for information in their enormous file systems," says Schwartz, adding that one of the startup's customers has a billion files in its systems.

The exec told Byte and Switch that Exanet has already racked up between three and five early adopters for ExaShare, although only one of these, the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, has been made public.

ExaSearch, which is available now, is priced depending on storage capacity, although Schwartz told Byte and Switch that this typically works out at about a quarter of the cost of an ExaStore deployment. Pricing for ExaStore is around 1 cent per Mbyte stored.

The startup is not the only vendor jostling for position in the NAS arena. Microsoft's Storage Server is another software offering in this space. Despite the presence of the Redmond software sasquatch, Schwartz cites NetApp as "the gorilla" in the NAS market, followed by EMC. (See NetApp Stokes Competitive Fires, EMC Talks Disk & De-Dupe, and EMC Unveils Next-Gen Backup.) The startup's third main rival is Isilon, which Schwartz says his team occasionally encounters in the digital media space. (See Isilon's Counting on Clusters, Faceoff in the Vertical, Isilon Moves Down, Adaptec Moves Up, and Double-Take, Isilon Go Public.)

Whereas these firms tout NAS hardware, Schwartz reiterates Exanet's software-based approach, claiming that this removes the risk of hardware lock-in. "It's a different paradigm for storage -- it's software running on top of commodity hardware," he says, explaining that Exanet runs on top of storage from HDS, IBM, Nexsan, Xiotech, Sun, HP, and EMC.Exanet also fired a shot across the bows of market leader NetApp when it added CDP to its clustered NAS offerings last year. (See Exanet Dips Toe in CDP Pool, Exanet Launches CDP, Clusters & CDP: Well Matched, and Isilon's Counting on Clusters.) NetApp's competitors have made much of the fact that Ontap 7G still lacks "true" continuous data protection, despite its acquisition of Alacritus in 2005. (See NetApp Annexes Alacritus and NetApp's Kidd Talks Turkey.)

The Exanet CEO did not divulge any more roadmap details when he spoke to Byte and Switch, although he confirmed that further funding rounds are unlikely. "This is crafted to be the last round, taking Exanet to break-even point," he says. The exec would not divulge exactly when this will be, but hinted that the startup will be profitable sometime in the near future. "I would not say that we are very far away from it."

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch